Incredible Shadows 1 - Valentine's Day
by eisceire
Summary: Reflection on the unexpected ways superheroes can affect everyday lives & how they aren't perhaps so out of the ordinary themselves. No sex but a bit of action & death near the end.


_**AUTHOR NOTE »»» Fear not! The story has a start, a middle, an end and all in the right order. It's even complete. Gentle Reader; you can take all of this tale (and all of it in one hit too) and it'll stand up for itself, all by itself. It does better in company though. Read the rest of Incredible Shadows and, even, Metroville Two-Step; if you want to add depth to each piece and add them all together for a bigger story.**_

Bobbo ambled his way through the mall in no especial rush to get nowhere; whatever about the classy, pricey, designer jogging kit that he was sporting ... he'd not the least intention of sporting off after anything at all. It was one of life's lotteries little quirks that the most suitable suits for people of a certain largeness and lifestyle were sportswear; the perversity might have pleased him if he'd been of a pondering rather than a ponderous persuasion. Introspection, speculation, agitation, the entire world of _tion _was foreign to him. Most especially, right now, he was being an exception from the exertion club: it was Valentines Day and he was due out with the wife in the evening so he'd given himself an entire day to cruise round the mall; it'd taken on an adrenalin boost of glitz for the saint's day, while the shops and restaurants had lavishly laid out all their costliest fare ... just to empty lovers' pockets into their tills.

Not one person out of all those there cared that they were being milked though: money there was in plenty and it was being spent with abandon; all around him were Supers in tuxs & dresses, bracelets & rings, gold & silver, platinum & diamond. The volte face validation of their valour against the vicious, violent, villainy of Syndrome had seen them vindicated and victorious in almost every walk of life. In posters, banners, window dressings, mannequins and adverts their dazzlingly brilliant images were everywhere, marketing everything; boosting a clear, bright, comic-book culture where light beat might all of the time and somehow this had spilled over into the humdrum world: a boost of confidence, a surge of pzazz ... people were spending, trade was growing, industry reviving; Uncle Sam was dancing and he was dancing a jig.

Bobbo shrugged, the only larger-than-life figure that was truly in the mall as of right now was himself and that wasn't at all the kind of larger-than-life that impressed anyone at all; he was done with busting a gut to turn his life around. Whatever about the presumptions of the Syndromes, Sansweets and Sawyers (that train driver); it seemed to him that, whatever your schemes, the world just rolled on as it would. Out of all the numbers of folks there were in the country; there hadn't been more than a handful, overall, that'd raised the storm that had seen the Supers drummed out of town and where had that wound up in the end of it all? There'd been superheroes, then there hadn't been superheroes and now here there were superheroes again.

It hadn't only been Supers that had found it tough through the last ten years or so either; life was tough all over — though at least nobody was running around plotting how to take that life away from you, if you were just regular folks; an ordinary working stiff had a fair chance of staying working rather than ending up as a stiff. Surely enough it had been a struggle these last years when, like so many other professionals, he'd seen his trade go to wall and had to eke out an existence in a squeak from one gloom-grey job to another. Bobbo had hardly been so resigned about maters in those days: he'd raged, moaned, kicked against the traces and searched out every sniff of his old trade. Despite it all and despite the Supers Act seeming to cast a pall over the whole country, it was still a Super's blow-up that had turned his life around, in the end ... when he lost his job at the office because the office lost their offices to an impromptu touch of Super demolition work.

It wasn't as if he got any compensation for it, nor redundancy pay, nor re-employment assistance; indeed all he got from that Super's storm was a super storm on the family side and now he got to be a stay-at-home dad, with the chances of another nine to fiver running at slim to none ... which was the best thing that could have happened for the family; for the mom most of all. Down the years she'd been home-studying Law and was near enough to finished that she could pick up some legal jobs, just so long as he was around to mind things. So it was that Bobbo was content enough to drift along, fielding whatever came; there just was no use bucking the deus ex machina that seemed to delight in making lives « gang agley » and usually came packaged in Super form.

Supers: Reshape parts that no other powers can reach, Bobbo mocked to himself. No more kids, no more bedplay even ... « Not in a world where supervillains are crashing down on your street; I won't bring a child into that » so ran his wife's writ. She was the Super legal expert too; it wasn't just any Law she'd been studying: she'd been understudying for Simon Paladino (lawyer to the Supers) as she'd seen Superlaw as a ripe field and it was an even riper one for her now, with the death of her mentor under his alter ego of Gazerbeam. Yes, indeed Supercareers were a flourishing field and even a body like his could reap a small cash crop by modelling for Edna Mode (designer to the Supers); it was about the only thing that cast any panache over him: that he could casually comment in a conversation that he was A Model for The Mode — at least until anyone asked what it was he modelled and he could only lie or admit it was one of her many sidelines ... Clown Suits. The conversation usually went downhill from there and any pretty young things melted away like ice in a desert, which was the hardest for Bobbo to bear since his wife had stopped giving him his nightly desserts. Hah ... even his daughter wouldn't look at ordinary guys now; she was crushing on the Supers, like every teenamerican girl these days: « All these Tony guys are so phony dad ! So what if they can bench press a girl's weight. Mr Incredible could pick her up in one hand ».

Moodily, he gazed at a mural of the town from olden days and wondered if all this Super stuff was really so very untoward. Back in the day there'd been a barracks in his hometown and all the girls then had been crushing on the soldiers while his mom worried about how safe a town full of army was for kids. Honestly so, was his wife being Lawyer to Supers so very different to any other legal specialism and weren't Supers just firefighters and cops in spandex; why ... BAM

Gunfire had Bobbo wishing Supers were right here, right now ... at the Berettas flash and the rifles crash, to the echo of the Thompson gun that thugs had mounted on the gallery above the mezzanine he was on. Their idea of a Valentines day outing was to ransack the mall and rob the revellers blind. They were off to a good start too: with all the mallcops corralled in a Sushi stall while the thugs made a meal of everything else and used the highpoint gun to countermand any derring do before any daring got done. Bobbo didn't dare move, he was pretty sure the gun-guys overhead couldn't see him, where he was on the mezzanine under them, but if he shifted so much as a foot he was terrified that they'd let rip. The robbers were running riot; piling up baskets and trolleys like a horde of bargain hunters at the January sales ... only it wasn't toasters and jeans that loaded them down but wallets & watches, gems & jewelry, credit-cards & coins, high-end & high-tech kit. Wherever and whenever a biddy baulked at bidding goodbye to her gems or a gentleman gibed at saying sayonara to a swiss Swiss watch there'd be a swirl of activity, of violence, a blow to the head or belly, the flow of blood and a body down. That nobody had been shot or knifed as yet was the veriest luck, a situation such as this could no nothing but swiftly, spiral into savagery and chaos; nor was their the least hope of authorities intervening with the mallcops under guard and the mall locked down by the lumpenkind. The lumpen proletariat, in the form of Bobbo and many more, were locked into one of the multifarious moments in their lives where they were mere, muttering onlookers to matters of moment.

What a moment it was too ... as a red and black blur pinballed over the ground promenade and a violet sphere swelled out of the sushi stand, splitting it to splinters, setting a stormtroop of mallcops free to fight the freebooters. It was the Incredibles, at least two of them: the speedster Dash and the soapbubble spinning girl. Primary hued lighting raged all through the complex, tearing apart the storm cloud of crooks, ripping apart the mood of terror and despair that had descended on the debacle only moments before. The gritty, grim, grimy everyday ordeal of a mugging, a robbery, a thievery had turned into a starburst, spectacle of exhilaration as, everywhere Dash dashed a desperado was dashed down and mallcops sprang upon and secured the sorry sinners. Bobbo had never had a grandstand view of Supers in action before and now that he had he could hardly believe how bright the world could become in just a blink of an eye.

That « Blink of an Eye » where was Bubbles, she could turn invisible as well as inflate a sphere; what was she at while Dash was dashingly doing his derring do down below? A rattle of gunfire from above advertised the answer: apparently Bubbles had become apparent to the Thompsonsists and they'd turned the Tommy Gun on her. Bobbo craned his head around in time to see the girl sweep a stream of erstwhile bowling balls through the crew and send then flying like hapless tenpins ... flying over the parapet and onwards, downwards. It was defences, self-defence; they'd fired on Bubbles first but that was the whole height of the mall to fall; Bobbo counted every thump and thud as the thugs made ground: one, then two, then three, and finally eight; eight coffins to be made! Bubbles had hardly paused to draw breath, not wasting a moment on the fate of the brigands she'd bested she belted down the stairway and along across the level below Bobbo. From his eagle's eyepoint caught a glimpse, a motion; a thug slipping into a niche across from the path that Bubbles was on. With his gun cocked, aimed and ready the thug was set for ambush and murder and Bobbo was frozen, caught in the instant, not knowing whether to move or to yell and the gun crashed, the bullet sang and a dying scream pierced Bobbo's ears.

In the very instant of firing, at that last crucial second, when there was no time to hesitate or consider then and only then had Bubbles caught sight of the danger and flung up a forcefield to save herself. It had snapped across the snicket even as the bullet left the gun and the round had ricocheted to make a ruin of the ruffian's face that not even a mother could recognise. That was what had happened, that was what had to have happened: a desperate, split-second, act of self-preservation. Bobbo had seen the incident from start to gory end and he knew he was right, knew that Bubbles could not have seen the danger and the snare, could not have anticipated and turned the trap on its head because if she had ... if she had — the comic book dream was no dream but a nightmare.


End file.
